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The president of the California firefighters’ union slammed Donald Trump on Friday for suggesting he would withold federal firefighting aid if the state didn’t go along with his political priorities.
“Former President Trump should be ashamed for threatening to withhold federal firefighting aid from California should he be elected,” California Professional Firefighters president Brian K. Rice wrote in a statement on Facebook on Friday.
“As of today, thousands of firefighters are on the front lines responding to wildfires throughout the state, and countless Californians are in harm’s way as they heed evacuation orders,” he added. “Nevertheless, former President Trump expressed that he would play with their lives and their homes if he doesn’t get what he wants.”
Earlier that day, Trump tore into California and its governor Gavin Newsom, whom the former president refers to as “Newscum,” over the state’s water policies, which have come under fire from farmers in red-leaning areas.
“The automobile industry is dead, the water coming here is dead, and Gavin ‘Newscum’ is gonna sign those papers,” Trump said at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf club. “And if he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires. And if we don’t give him all the money to put out fires, he’s got problems. He’s a lousy governor.”
The Independent has contacted the Trump campaign for comment.
Newsom hammered Trump on X, saying the former president was putting lives at risk “to settle political vendettas.”
“Today it’s California’s wildfires,” Newsom wrote. “Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina or flooding assistance for homeowners in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump doesn’t care about America — he only cares about himself.”
The comments come as California faces 11 simultaneous active wildfires which have burned over 650,000 acres, according to Cal Fire.
A combination of hot weather, climate change, and fuel built up in remote areas after a series of wet winters have primed the state for another deadly fire season.
Trump’s remarks, Rice noted, echoed similarly controversial claims Trump made about California fires in 2018, when he downplayed the link between fires and climate and instead claimed the state needed to do a better job “raking and cleaning” forests.
"I was with the president of Finland and he said ... we’re a forest nation, he called it a forest nation, and they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. They don’t have any problem, and what it is, it’s a very small problem," Trump said in 2018.
The Finnish president at the time said they never discussed raking.
Trump’s comments from California last week touched on a long-running, if slightly obscure, state political debate.
California moves large volumes of its water, much of which comes from snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, further south, dividing it between farmers in the Central Valley and residential areas throughout the state, including populous, water-starved cities like Los Angeles.
Because of a series of court decisions, the state also allows some of its water to flow unused into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and out through the San Francisco Bay, in order to protect fish species that support larger ocean ecosystems.
Some California farmers have pushed the state to divert more water for agriculture, and the Trump administration, working with an interior secretary who was a former Central Valley lobbyist, changed Obama-era rules to put more water in the fields.
Environmental groups and the Newsom administration sued to stop the changes, and the Biden administration is reportedly racing to lock in wildlife protections for the water before the end of the year.
Trump’s comments are unlikely to make much political difference in heavily blue California, where Biden carried a nearly 30-point lead over the Republican.
